Last night’s speech: the positive

I have plenty of negative things to say about the current administration’s policies and programs, but I thought I’d mention the one positive thing I heard in last night’s State of the Union speech. The administration’s energy policy has been quite misguided, and so have its spending proposals, specifically its requests for spending related to alternative fuels and alternative energy (“Let’s spend a ton of money on decades-down-the-road hydrogen research rather than cutting energy use and increasing use of current alternative fuels. Yay!”).

But it is nice to see the President publically embracing cellulosic ethanol production and requesting funding for further development. It’s not a groundbreaking idea or anything, but he could have just as easily ignored that area of research. Cellulosic ethanol is close to being a large-scale reality — it has the potential to greatly reduce petroleum use. So does the use of new feedstock sources for the production of biodiesel, which is already an extremely effecient process. Now to work on ethanol emissions…